


The Crouching Thing

by se_parsons



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:34:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27518443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/se_parsons/pseuds/se_parsons
Summary: Originally posted Mon, 17 Jul 2000Sometimes we see things we don't want to see.To M. Sebasky and Perelandra for uber-beta and, Sab, Ropobop, Livia, Alicia and the YV gang for commentsThis was a quote-challenge given to me by Wen. Use quotes from what she gave me, and construct a story around it.  They're at the end of the story.
Relationships: Dana Scully/Walter Skinner, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Kudos: 3





	The Crouching Thing

It was there again. She could see it out of the corner of her eye as she moved about the bright, yellow kitchen making breakfast. It hung about on the edge of the treeline, a shadow on shadowy leaves, only occasionally alerting her to its existence by some deliberate movement out of line of nature.

She wasn't entirely certain when it had first appeared. She was inclined to dismiss such things, even after all her years of exposure to them. She had never been a believer. She had never wanted to see the things that other people imagined only in nightmare.

But she'd been drawn in, all those years ago, drawn into believing in things unseen by the quiet voice of a man in a darkened motel room as he told her a story of childhood horror and loss. The story had drawn her in because it had been true. She had known it then, even if there had been no more proof than a boy's half-forgotten terror and a man's determination to find the reasons behind it.

They had uncovered those truths together, and in so doing had changed her perceptions of the universe for all time.

Now, she saw things. Things like what squatted at the corner of her vision by the bed of hostas Walter had planted the spring before. It was a dark, dirty shadow among the delicate, white blossoms on their fragile stalks. It broke one maliciously as she watched it out of the corner of her eye. It trampled another under its filthy feet. She knew that it had nothing against the flowers, that destruction was merely its nature. It was one of those kinds of things - destructive without even trying.

She turned her attention from it when she heard the sound of bare feet on the tile floor of her kitchen. She smiled as the tall young man stretched, joints popping to provide him the relief only a good stretch can. He was still dressed in jogging shorts and t-shirt from his run, but the shoes had been discarded at the door. Perhaps he had encountered some mud on his journey. Or perhaps he simply liked the feel of cool tile on his feet on a summer's morning. She had never thought to ask him the reason for such things and she didn't ask them now. She just noted them in passing, as she did nearly everything, gathering evidence in case it might become important later.

"Makin' breakfast?" he asked redundantly, his deep voice an echo of his father's as were the strong, long lines of his body. No stunted Scully genes evident there, thank God.

"Working on it," Scully said. "Do you think the others will be ready in time?"

Her son moved past her to the cupboards and began taking down the dishes. There would be breakfast for seven that morning, a fine way to drive away the thing crouching in the yard, with love and laughter.

"I saw that Kat and Dylan were up and getting ready when I got back from my run. And you know the kids have been glued to the TV watching the parade since some ungodly hour this morning," he said.

"Virtue of sleeping in the family room," Scully commented.

"They made a fort out of the couch cushions, like Will and I used to. I saw Simon's head poking out of it while he watched the float with whatever that Japanese superhero thing is that all the kids like," he told her.

"Well, if you would just find some nice girl and settle down instead of breaking hearts all over the Eastern Seaboard, you'd know what all the kids were into, too," Scully said, rummaging under the counter for the waffle iron.

"Excuse me?" her son laughed. "Who are you, and what have you done with my mother?"

"Oh, I've just decided I had to get in one mom-like thing per day. I was starting early this morning, and you happened to be here," Scully said, nearly dropping the waffle iron when she glanced out the window and saw its wizened form digging in her rose bed like a dog. She must have made some exclamation, because her son was at her side, a concerned look on his face. He turned his brown eyes toward the yard, but she could tell from their blank stare that he was unable to see it there, white-toothed and grinning, ripping at the roots of her prize roses.

"What's the matter, Mom?" he asked.

"Just jumping at nothing," she said. "Too many years of having to watch my back. A shadow is enough to set me off these days."

Better to lie, she thought. Better to be mysterious, to not tell too much. Her family was practical. They would see her ability to see the thing not as an ability, but as she would have viewed it when she was younger - as a sign of mental disturbance. Or perhaps, a sign of age, though no one in her family had ever suffered the loss of faculties that crippled so many.

She wished her children to ignore her white hair and wrinkling skin, to ignore it as the badge of impending loss it was. She wanted them to believe that life was long and actually improved us, that people were wiser, better, more knowledgeable later than early. She upheld the myth concocted to keep the young from learning what their elders really were - people no better than themselves - and despising and murdering them. Or putting them in the Home because of their failing mental faculties. She, like the others her age, wished to keep her children sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there was something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead.

It was important that they believed the lie of her invincibility, of her superiority, in case what she was seeing had to be revealed. Because Scully was not suffering from frailty or lack of vision, but from an excess of it. In all her years of searching for hidden truth, for things lost, her gaze had pierced the veil between the worlds. And it had brought back with it a shadow that now haunted her and blighted what should have been a time of comfort and quiet winding down.

She was not in need of psychiatric care, but more in need of a remedy. A method to close the door that the thing was using to access her plane of existence, to access her yard and her life. Perhaps she could contact the Calusari, though this thing was not really in their realm. Perhaps there might be a priest somewhere who still believed in such things, and who could perform an exorcism.

She didn't want to look at it anymore, to watch its pathetic antics. She wanted it gone.

"You know, I've read through all those case files," her son said.

"What?" she said absently as she watched it pissing on her prize John F. Kennedy.

"Yeah, I thought they might give me something really unique for my dissertation," he told her.

"And?"

"And I was right. I've never seen anything like it. But are you sure he wasn't crazy?" her son asked tentatively. "I know you and Dad both say he wasn't. But the stuff he wrote.... There are ten or twenty dissertations worth of paranoia there alone. Not to mention the textbook narcissism, megalomania and depression."

"That's no way to talk about him, Michael," Scully said, not really able to be irritated. She knew that's what Mulder's reports must have read like.

"I guess I still just don't understand what he was to you both," he said. "That you kept looking for him all those years. That he had such a hold on you. It was more than clear that he admired you, Mom, even though what he had to say about Dad was less than complimentary sometimes."

"Your father was in a difficult position, then," Scully said, putting batter mix in a bowl. "He had to do a number of things he didn't want to do. He thought he was protecting us, but that's not the way it seemed to Mulder. You have to remember, he didn't know everything your father knew, just like your father didn't know everything Mulder knew. And I don't know why you want to go digging through all that stuff anyway. We've put it away for a reason. There's just no use dredging it all up now."

"Like I said," Michael told her, getting eggs out of the refrigerator, "he's an interesting personality. Like Sherlock Holmes or something. Larger than life. And considering how much he affected our lives, even though he was gone... I thought he might make a good subject, but there's a lot of stuff that wasn't in the record. "

"Of course there is," Scully told him. "You don't have any of his personal things. You just have the reports he showed to other people."

"You mean there's more? I mean, I saw you had his power of attorney. If you've got his private papers... Mom, you've got to let me have them!" Michael said, going back for the milk.

"I don't have to do any such thing."

Scully carefully cracked eggs into her bowl of mix while it leaped in agitated fashion right in the center of the lawn, on the edge of the shade thrown by the trees. It was angry. Its feet tore at the grass and kicked it up like a bull getting ready to charge.

"Why not?" Michael asked. "Don't you want me to be fair to him? How can I truly represent him with just the public documents? If you know where his personal stuff is, isn't it only right that I see that as well? Maybe he won't come off like such a crackpot then."

"He'd come off as even more of a crackpot, then," Scully said.

It had thrown itself upon the grass and was rolling and clawing and foaming at the mouth. She added milk and got out the mixer.

"It was all over a long time ago, Michael," Scully told him. "I know you've always been interested in him, in our work. More than you should have been, I think. I don't know why it was you who had that fascination anymore than I can understand how you ended up as a psychologist and historian, considering your father's and my background. But it has to stop somewhere. And writing your book on a footnote of FBI history and a mysterious disappearance isn't going to do anything but dredge up a lot of trouble that's better off buried. It can only hurt the few people left alive who still remember it."

"Like you?"

"I'd be one of them, yes," Scully said. "Your father'd be another. And then there's always Mulder's sister, and her family."

"The ones in Arizona?"

"Yes," Scully said. "They don't need to be reminded of all that mess. They don't need you dredging up information on The Project, or the clones, or the smallpox bees or any of it. That woman has suffered worse torture than any ten people can be expected to survive in a lifetime. She doesn't need some boy writing a book, making her brother look like a madman. Especially because he wasn't. He was right. It doesn't matter what he was like, only that he figured it out. That he figured it out in time so we were able to stop it."

"But you can have no real understanding of how he figured it out - how he did it, if you have no feel for him as a human being," Michael argued. "I mean, you knew him, Mom. And you and Dad almost never mention his name. Even when we were kids. Even when you were still looking for him, when you were still carrying on his work. We never heard any Mulder stories. We never heard about things he said, or things he did, or much of anything at all. I've seen pictures of him. I've watched that tape of him at the UFO hearing where he says he doesn't believe in them about a million times. I've watched the episode of "Cops" where he makes fun of you and treats you like crap and runs around like a total lunatic. I still have an incredibly unclear understanding of him as a human being. What was he like?"

Scully watched it out the window. It had scurried over to the fence beside the driveway. It had Simon's basketball in its clutches and was pounding it down over and over onto the pointed top of the picket fence. If she didn't stop it, her grandson's toy would be destroyed. It was always doing things like that. Trying to get her attention. Ever since it had first appeared.

She thought back. When exactly had she first seen it? It seemed to her that it had been hanging around forever, but it hadn't been. But remembering its advent was very nearly the same thing as trying to remember what Mulder had been like. Something you knew very well, but was just out of reach of your conscious mind. Something just barely beyond you.

"What does it matter, anyway, Michael?" Scully asked as she ignored its antics with the basketball and poured batter into the waffle iron. "He's a tiny footnote of history. He wasn't here to do any of the work. He just pointed the way."

"You mean like Galileo or Newton," Michael told her obstinately, with the mulish expression on his face that so reminded her of his father when he was in no mood to be argued with.

It had been with them, with her, since she had retired to this big house in the country. The house with the big yard and the good driveway for grandchildren to play in safely, so different from the one they'd lived in in the city when she and Walter had still been working. Had she seen it before? She thought not. It seemed to be a phantom of her leisure time. Something to blight what should have been her golden years of reminiscence and basking in the glory of her happy family.

She didn't remember when she'd first noticed it. But it had been out of the corner of her eye. And since then, she'd seen it often. Usually in the yard, but sometimes in the basement when she took down the laundry, or in the corner of the upstairs stairwell, waiting to clutch at her as she walked by. It seemed to always be somewhere, though sometimes it would vanish outside, and she would not see it for days, only to spy it later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping on a vole or eating old snow.

"These are not things you want to know," Scully said, shutting the iron to begin breakfast. She turned on the oven, so she could place the waffles inside to keep them warm until the rest of the family assembled.

"Why? Was he an asshole? Some of the greatest men in the world have been total assholes, Mom, it doesn't change what they did," Michael said. "What could you possibly tell me about him that could shock me or anyone?"

She looked up and jumped. It was peering in the window, leaving smeary, dirty traces on the panes from its dripping nostrils. It attached its dry lips to the window in an obscene parody of a kiss and then slipped down out of sight again.

"What's the matter with you this morning, Mom?" Michael asked. "Asking about him can't possibly be upsetting you this much, can it?"

"I touched the waffle iron," Scully lied. "It was hot."

"Are you ok?" Michael was concerned. He was a good person. All her children were. She was very lucky.

"Yes, I got my arm off in time. I wasn't burned," she said. "And asking about Mulder doesn't upset me. I am just amazed that you're so interested after all this time. No one's been interested in him before."

"That's not true. We were always interested. I've talked about it with Kat and Will. In fact, we talked about it a lot back when we were kids and you and Dad were so obsessed with finding him that you were hardly ever home. Turns out we were all sort of afraid to ask you back then. We knew you were working on finding him and that you never did. Then, when we grew up, we figured, why stir up the past? We didn't want to make you feel bad," Michael said. "But things are different now. You and Dad have both been retired for years. What can it possibly hurt? And don't you want the story to be told while you're still here to make sure it gets done right? I mean, how wrong can you go when it's me that's doing the telling?"

"There are things about the story that are nobody's business," Scully said. "Things that have nothing to do with Mulder's work or what happened to him."

"But things that do shed light on his personality, right?" Michael asked.

"Yes," she replied, taking out the first golden brown waffle. She sprayed the iron again and added more batter to cook. The completed treat went into the oven to warm.

"And you don't trust me to have any discretion?" Michael asked. "You think I'll violate him in some way?"

"I don't think it's something that anyone needs to know to understand what he accomplished," Scully said. "People deserve some privacy."

It was skulking now near the garage, and she could see why. Walter was coming home from the store and an orange juice run, pulling his car inside. The sight of Walter always seemed to drive it mad, and it was slavering and clawing on the siding, bloodying itself in its impotent rage. That was mostly what it was, helpless rage, trapped somehow nearby her in a horrifying, twisted shape. She could sense its rage whenever she drew near. She liked to keep it out of the house and tried to do so by ignoring it, no matter what it did, and lighting candles. She didn't know if the candles helped, but they helped her to feel better, anyway.

Her husband came in the door, and she could see it there in the darkness of the garage, crawling in his shadow. He slammed the door in its face, unaware of its presence, of its existence. He placed the grocery bags on the counter and smiled at their son as he began to unpack.

"Good run this morning?" he asked, deep voice an older version of the young man's before him.

"Not nearly as good as the one Mom's been giving me since then," Michael said. "Or would that be run-around?"

"About what?" Walter asked, folding up the bag and putting it away before beginning on the next one.

"Mulder," Scully said, putting the next waffle in the oven and pouring more batter in the pan.

It was crawling up the drainpipe now, and she was glad that everyone was awake if it was going to get inside the house. She didn't like it when it came inside in the dark. She would lie awake and feel its eyes on her, watching. Sometimes she could feel its foul breath on her hair or its chilling touch on her cheek. Unlike most people, when things went bump in the night, she always knew what they were. Better that it came in the daytime when she could keep an eye on it and not have to wait for it to touch her.

"The dissertation again," Walter said, voice carefully neutral, but it was obvious he was displeased. She'd seen that look on his face a thousand times as Mulder had explained why again they had no evidence or why again they were over budget.

"I know you don't like the idea of it, Dad," Michael said stubbornly. "But who better to get the truth down on paper than someone who knows the people who worked on it? And who knew Mulder better than you two? His own sister didn't, and doesn't, because I've talked to her."

"You've what?" her husband was very angry now. They'd long ago decided Samantha's privacy was inviolable.

"I mailed her and got permission to call. She gave me a very clear idea of what he was like as a boy. What she remembered. I didn't pry about what she suffered. I didn't make her relive her abduction. That's all documented. She was actually very nice. She liked the idea that someone would try to understand him as a person. But she told me that I should ask you. That you knew him best," Michael explained. "How could I tell her that the two of you never talk about him? She's under the impression that you're his friends."

Scully slammed the lid down on the waffle iron as she put more batter inside. 

She couldn't see it, so she listened for sounds coming from upstairs. Sounds not made by her daughter and son-in-law as they got ready to come down for breakfast.

"We spent the better part of our lives finishing what he started. Trying to find out what happened to him," Walter said coldly. "I think that makes us his friends."

"But did you like him? Was he nice? Did he have any human feelings at all, or was he just some alien-hunting, obsessed, paranoid lunatic? Because that's how he comes off on the public record," Michael stuck by his guns. "You know that Chief Inspector Green wrote about him in her memoirs. You know the way she smeared him, the kinds of things she said about him. I mean, she insulted the poor man about every way it's possible to insult someone, right down to calling him a lousy lay. If you are his friends, don't you want to do something about that? Don't you think it's fair to him to let people know what he was really like?"

"Walter, could you take over, please?" Scully asked, turning to her husband and nodding at the waffle iron. "I'll tell the kids to come to the kitchen. We're almost ready."

"Sure," he said, and stepped forward to do as she asked.

"So is this how it's going to be?" Michael demanded. "You're just going to pretend like he doesn't even exist. Like he never existed. Just like you've been doing all these years. And you're going to let people smear him and lie about him and call him a crackpot even though you're in the position to do something about it. Some friends!"

"It's no one's business, Michael," Scully said calmly, shaking her head at her husband, who looked about ready to intervene. "But if this is going to be such an issue in our relationship with one another, then I'll get his things down from the attic. That's where they've been all these years. You can read them and ask us questions if you think it will help. But I don't think you'll find anything useful in them. I'll unlock the trunk after I send Kat and Dylan downstairs. You can go and look through them after breakfast."

"And I'll find what that's upset you this much?" Michael said. "You always get incredibly calm whenever you're really upset, like when Grandma died."

"I'm fine, Michael," Scully told him heading for the stairs, but he followed her and took her arm.

She could see it on the landing, a dark blot against her wainscoting. It was grinning at her and her son. She was glad Michael couldn't see it. That he didn't know where to look. That he didn't know how.

"Tell me what it is. What you don't want me to find out," Michael said. "It will be better if you tell me than if you just let me read it. It will be better for you and me both."

"If you think so, you're the psychologist," Scully answered her son, but she was looking at the thing. It was quiet now, waiting for her to approach. It knew she noticed and acknowledged it, and that was the only thing that seemed to make it content. It waited.

"Tell me," Michael pressed, his hand on her arm more a support now than a restraint.

"Mulder is your sister's father," Scully said simply looking into her son's warm brown eyes. "We never hid the fact that there's a gap between when Kat was born and when your father and I were married."

"Right, she was four before you got married," Michael said, shaking his head trying to assimilate the information. "We kids figured it was just one of those independence things. You're both pretty strong people, and we know Dad was married before. We figured it just took you both a while to decide if that was what you wanted. None of us ever thought that... I mean, it never occurred to us."

"I didn't know I was pregnant when they took him," Scully said, still watching the thing. "Mulder never knew about her. And we never found him to tell him. We didn't want you children feeling strange about each other. You were a family. You were ours. You were too young to know there was ever anything else. There was no reason to tell you or to drag you into it. That's it. That's the only thing."

"Were you in love with him?" Michael asked gently.

"I can't explain what we were to each other," Scully said. "You can never really know something like that unless you're a part of it. But "in love" was never what we were. "In love" is something so pale and trite that it could never scratch the surface. If it hadn't been for Kat, and for Walter, I would have died without him and we would never have known each other. Go back to the kitchen now, and I'll unlock the trunk. You can start after breakfast."

"I'm sorry, Mom," Michael said soberly. "I had no idea."

"I know that," Scully said, patting his hand where it lay on her arm. "I'm the one who gave you no idea, remember?"

She stood at the foot of the stairs looking up at the thing as her son returned slowly to the yellow kitchen. Then she began to climb. It scurried on ahead like an over-anxious puppy on a walk, keeping just out of reach but near enough to trip her if it stopped too long.

On the second floor she stopped at the door to the guest room.

"Kat? Breakfast is almost ready. Get the kids to the table, will you?" she called, amazed at how normal her voice sounded.

"No problem, Mom." It wasn't her daughter, but her son-in-law who replied. Kat was still in the bathroom, having inherited her mother's propensity for soaking in a hot tub.

Scully walked the length of the hall and opened the door to the attic. It was pitch black above her, and cold, though it was summer. It smelled dark and dusty, and she knew the thing awaited her there, clutching toward her in the darkness.

But it never paid to be frightened, and Scully stepped forward into the darkened space, feeling the wall for the light switch and the floor for the first of the stairs upward.

It was then that it attacked.

She could feel it around her, cold and dry and lightly touching. It brushed her ankles, it touched the back of her neck, it grazed the top of her head. Scully flailed, arms windmilling to fend it off, make it back away. She stepped backward toward the safety of the light. It stayed back when there was light.

It touched her again on the cheek, a light touch but horrible and more fleshly than she ever recalled it. She flailed her arms again, and this time her hand made impact with something truly of flesh. She heard it strike the ground with a thud and a crack as if something was horribly broken.

She sank down on the steps, pulled her robe tighter. She felt for the light switch and flicked it on. The bat, she could now see, was small and light-colored, its wings folded in like a packing tent, a mouse with backpacking equipment. It had a sweet face, like a deer, though blood drizzled from its head. It reminded her of a cat she'd once seen as a child, shot with a BB in the eye. 

In the light of the dim bulbs hanging from bare cords in the cavernous space above her, she could see it once again. It awaited her at the top of the stairs. Its grin was back.

She calmed herself and rose. She walked toward it. But this time it refused to give her any ground, hovering there, near the trunk packed full of Mulder's belongings. As if it secretly coveted them, though they were as useless to it as they were to him now.

She reached up and took the key from the nail where she'd hung it when they'd moved to this new place. It crouched beside the trunk as if eager to see the things inside. A small collection, really, to be the sum of a man's life. It ran its fingers over the surface of the metal knowing it was the center of her attention again and basking in it.

"Are you happy now?" she asked the thing. "Are you glad because I'm going to let him see? That there will be more people to suffer now? I used to think that wasn't what you wanted."

It looked at her and its eyes seemed green in the darkness as they sometimes used to.

"I only wanted you," it said in its gravel-choked voice. "But you forgot me."

"I didn't forget," Scully said. "I never forgot. I only stopped suffering."

"You forgot," it accused. "I never forgot. Even lost. Found you. Won't leave you, Scully."

Scully just looked at it crouching there, twisted and ugly like the bodies he'd described stacked like cordwood in a buried boxcar. But she knew what it was, this shadow. And she knew it couldn't be driven away as long as she was alive.

"What purpose will it serve for him to go through these things? For him to know and to write it all down? It won't change anything," she told it.

"You remember better then," it said. "He'll remind you."

"What good does it do, Mulder?" she cried, despairing. "What good does it do for him to know that I cried when he was born because he wasn't yours? What good is it that I could never love his father like he deserved because he wasn't you? How can it possibly matter to anyone but you and me now?"

"I only care it matters to you," he rose from his crouch beside the box. He was no longer tall as she remembered, but stooped and blackened and burned beyond recognition except for the gold glint of her cross at his throat and the wetness of the living eyes behind the crumbling face. "You're all I have. All that mattered. You never came. I waited long. You forgot. So I had to come for you."

"I'll let him look at those things," she said. "But I'll never tell him about this. This isn't for him."

"Right about that, Scully," Mulder said, pushing up her chin with a finger that was half blackened bone, voice croaking out of lungs that no longer breathed. "Between you and me. Better get used to me here, not leaving without you this time. Stupid to separate. Only good when we're together."

"Have I gone mad finally?" she asked. "I waited for you to come home for so long."

"Ask your son," Mulder said. "He's the PhD."

Scully bent down and unlocked the trunk.

"I have to go down and serve breakfast," she said as she rose. He had melted back into the shadows again.

"Go," he said. "I'll follow you."

-30-

Wen's original quotes:

This taboo regarding age is to make us believe that life is long and actually improves us, that we are wiser, better, more knowledgeable later than early. It is a myth concocted to keep the young from learning what we really are and despising and murdering us. We keep them sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there is something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead.

'Beautiful Grade' 

She was accustomed to much nesting and appreciation and drips from the faucet, though sometimes she would vanish outside, and they would not see her for days, only to spy her later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping on a vole or eating old snow. 

Agnes of Iowa 

She sank down on the steps, pulled her robe tighter. She felt for the light switch and flicked it on. The bat, she could now see, was small and light colored, its wings folded in like a packing tent, a mouse with backpacking equipment. It had a sweet face, like a deer, though blood drizzled from its head. It reminded her of a cat she'd once seen as a child, shot with a BB in the eye. 

Community Life 

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore


End file.
